MoU with NRM casts shadow over UPC as 2021 inches closer

L-R: Lira Municipality MP Jimmy Akena, former UPC presidential flag bearers Miria Obote and Olara Otunnu.

By Isaac Mufumba

Late last month, the Uganda Peoples Congress (UPC) party announced that it would not be fielding a presidential candidate in February’s general election.
The leader of one of its factions, Mr Jimmy Akena, argued that parties in the Opposition need to get their priorities right and invest in the right places instead of going into elections for the sake of it.

This, he said, had informed his decision to focus on retaining his Lira East Municipality parliamentary seat and strengthening the party’s grassroots structures in order for it to be able to work on increasing its representation in local governments and in Parliament.

He beefed up his argument by pointing at the events in Parliament on December 20, 2017, when MPs voted on the Constitutional Amendment Act, 2017, resulting in the scrapping of the upper and lower age limits for the President.
“This (number that was needed to frustrate Raphael Magyezi’s motion) is about 150 Members of Parliament. The whole combined Opposition did not make even 70... You need the numbers in Parliament,” Mr Akena said.

This effectively means that one of the parties that has had so much in shaping the history of the country will for the second time running not be fielding a presidential candidate, having not fielded one in 2016.
Mr Dennis Enap, a former aspirant in the race for the party presidency, was quick to disagree with Mr Akena’s decision, saying it would further weaken the party.

“The party not fielding a presidential candidate has political effects on its strength of mobilisation and our performance in areas outside Akena’s constituency…Who will the party members vote? Members will be torn between Museveni, Bobi Wine… because of not having a candidate for the presidency. The party risks losing its members because of affiliations to other presidential candidates,” Mr Enap argued.

Betrayal?
Mr Yona Kanyomozi, who was minister for Cooperatives and Marketing during the Obote II regime and later became national chairman of the party when Ms Miria Obote was its president, says Mr Akena’s announcement amounts to reneging on a promise he made when he first assumed, albeit controversially, the party presidency.

“He (Akena) used some tricks. He was there busy saying he was going to be a flag bearer for the next elections (2016). Once they finished voting, he said he was not going to stand,” Mr Kanyomozi points out.

Old argument
Mr Akena is not the first to argue against fielding a candidate “for the sake of it”. He is also not the first to talk about the need for parties to get their “priorities” right.

The Justice Forum has not fielded a candidate since Mr Muhammad Kibirige Mayanja stood in 2011. Mr Asuman Basalirwa, the current party president, recently made an argument similar to what Mr Akena is making.

Conservative Party has not fielded a candidate in many decades now, preferring to work with FDC, at least while Dr Kizza Besigye was the party’s president and presidential candidate.

DP did not field one in 2016 and it is increasingly looking like it will not. In both cases, the arguments for not fielding candidates have been similar to what Mr Akena is saying.

In light of the above, his argument should sound plausible, even logical, but it has sounded very hollow and unbelievable coming from Akena.

In announcing his decision not to contest, Mr Akena said that the position was arrived at in consultation with other leaders of the party, but Prof Sabiiti Makara, a teacher of Political Science at Makerere University, does not believe so.
“The main reason (for not fielding a presidential candidate) is that it is in some kind of coalition with the ruling party (NRM). Mr Akena’s wife is a minister in the government. Declaring his candidature would mean an end to that coalition, which I do not think he can afford,” Prof Makara argues.

MoU with NRM
Talk about a coalition and a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the ruling NRM and Akena’s UPC faction has been around for quite a while now.

In June 2016, Mr Museveni confirmed during a meeting with NRM leaders from the Lango Sub-region, who were protesting the naming of Mr Akena’s wife, Ms Betty Amongi, and another UPC member, Ms Ruth Achieng, as minister for Lands and minister of State for Fisheries respectively, that he had been working with Akena for a while. Mr Museveni later rescinded the decision on Ms Achieng.

“I am sorry I did not inform you earlier, but I have in a clandestine relation with them (UPC) since 2011,” Mr Museveni said.

Despite that admission on the part of Mr Museveni, Mr Akena seems to speak with a lisp whenever the matter comes up. In 2016, he acknowledged it and it resulted in the appointment of his wife to Cabinet, but in July this year he turned around to say no MoU had been signed.

“There were discussions, there were some fruits of those discussions, but there has not been an MoU signed and especially when it comes to elections,” Mr Akena said while appearing on NBS Television on July 6.

However, Mr Michael Osinde, the former spokesperson of Mr Akena’s faction, told Sunday Monitor in an earlier interview that the understanding with the NRM was aimed at helping the party to grow.

“We were tired of seeing the police block our activities such as political rallies and membership recruitment drives. We need to have this arrangement in order for us to be able to rejuvenate the party,” Mr Osinde said.

Contents of the MoU
If what Mr Osinde said was anything to go by, then one of the issues agreed upon was giving Akena’s UPC a free hand to operate without impediment.

Mr Kanyomozi says it is only Mr Akena who can say what they are, but hastens to add that he doubts that what they agreed on was for the benefit of the party. Whatever was agreed upon, he says, was to Mr Akena’s and Mr Museveni’s benefits, but more beneficial to the former.

“The issue of the party is secondary to keeping their seats. So they are there to keep their positions, not to cause any trouble and to serve in government under the pretext that they are pro-Uganda,” Mr Kanyomozi says.

Mr Kanyomozi believes that the MoU should be looked at in the same way as one would look at a non-aggression pact.

“What I think is there (in MoU) is an agreed position of saying you do not cause me trouble. I am more interested in keeping my position in Parliament and keep my office in Uganda House, I will also not cause you any trouble. Most of my MPs also want to keep their seats. So Museveni knowing the power game says okay, although I will put there my people to stand against your people, I will not support them. Yours will be the ones to get them unless there is internal competition amongst you,” he says.

If Mr Kanyomozi’s analysis is correct, it suggests that UPC under Mr Akena has long ceased to be a national party with aspirations to take over leadership at the highest level, but how did matters come to this?
Factionalism
Prof Makara blames the fall of UPC on the factionalism that has plagued the party since July 1985 that saw it ejected from power.

“UPC has been undermined by internal fighting. Factionalism has eaten up the roots of the party and the extent has been so big that it has lost its mission of taking power at the highest level,” Prof Makara says.

One of the points of contention has been the management of the Milton Obote Foundation (MOF).

MOF was founded in the 1960s and set up assets like Uganda House and a few companies to raise money to fund the party’s activities, but greedy individuals have since taken over those assets held under MOF and do not fund the party’s activities.

The party is perennially broke. That explains why Mr Olara Otunnu was never able to convene a single annual general meeting or any meeting of the national council during the five years of his presidency. Despite being a member of the Board of Trustees, Mr Akena is facing a similar challenge.

Mr Kanyamozi, however, says it goes beyond greed and factionalism.

He points at the vacuum created by Dr Obote’s failure to quickly realise the need for putting in place an interim leadership to run the show while he was in exile.

“In the beginning, we thought of a temporary arrangement with an interim leadership to run the party, but that did not come to Dr Obote and those around him. Most instructions were coming from Lusaka [Zambia] and they would become second-hand. The interpretation by those who were here to the nation was also a problem,” Mr Kanyomozi said.

That led to the first factional fights that featured Dr James Rwanyarare, Prof Patrick Rubaihayo and Ms Cecilia Ogwal.
Ms Ogwal once questioned the legality of Obote’s claim to the UPC presidency.

Expectations from
Miria, Otunnu
UPC was, however, dealt more blows by the misplaced expectation that Ms Miria Obote would turn the party’s fortunes around when she ran for the presidency in 2006. She may have been a good First Lady, but she was not suited for the rough and tumble of politics and such a campaign.

Fielding Olara Otunnu in the 2011 was perhaps a bigger mistake. As it turned out, he did not even vote for himself!
Sections of the party had been opposed to his election as president of UPC because of his involvement in the 1985 coup, but expectations in his abilities to revive the party overrode those concerns.

“We thought he was going to bring in resources. He had been assistant to UN Secretary General, Mr Javier Felipe Ricardo Pérez de Cuéllar, was said to have been a classmate of [former British] prime minister Tony Blair and well known to people like [Kenyan opposition leader] Raila Odinga. They said he was going to bring pickups for the party chairpersons in the districts, and motorcycles for the chairpersons in the sub-counties. It turned out to be a phantom,” Mr Robert Kanusu, who was once Mr Otunu’s spokesperson, said.

The question now is where all the factional fights, lack of funds, vilification and demonisation by the NRM, greed of the MOF trustees over the last 36 years has left the party.

“UPC has been reduced to a tribal party with all its MPs coming from the Lango sub-region,” Prof Makara says.

Can it recover and become the once national party that pursued a policy of “ethnic de-participation”, with deemphasising reliance on ethnic cleavages as the basis for political support? Mr Kanyomozi doubts that it can happen under the leadership of Mr Akena.

“I think he (Akena) has something lacking. At one time people were questioning his academic record and I am sure he is not confident enough. If it was his older brother (Tonny Akaki) maybe things would have been different,” Mr Kanyomozi says.

It is a damning conclusion from the party’s national chairman. That points to the need by Mr Akena to prove Mr Kanyomozi and other doubters wrong. Whether he does so is another matter.